Thanks to everyone who attended our day-long ‘mini-conference’ on “Realizing SharePoint as a Development Platform” in Waltham yesterday. It was great to see everyone, and I hope you feel you got a good mix of overview and deep-dive demos.

As promised, the slides can be found here.

Many thanks to the other presenters who helped make this a reality – Chris Bortlik  and Bob German – plus the insights and expertise from our good friends at Magenic.

We look forward to doing it all over again in Rochester, NY on December 9th!

If you and I have ever talked about cross-platform support for ALM functions (version control, requirements management, bug tracking, reporting, etc.), without question I brought Teamprise to your attention. Teamprise extends the capabilities of Team Foundation Server out to other ‘other’ platforms and IDEs (e.g. Eclipse for Java development on a Mac).

Many of you loved the concept of Teamprise. But perhaps you were nervous about the organization (how big are they? who will answer my support questions? how do I know that they will continue to release new revisions to match the new versions of TFS?) Maybe you simply didn’t want to have to deal with a 3rd party for licensing (‘isn’t the whole point of MSDN is that we get everything we need?’).

Well, now you’ve got no excuses. Microsoft Acquires Teamprise Assets. (Or, more correctly, you’ll have no excuses when the Visual Studio 2010 wave of products hits.) I personally think this is fantastic news and greatly improves Microsoft’s position to compete in the ALM space. Fuller details to come soon.

Although I’d hate to give you to stop reading this blog (and, let’s face it, at about 10-15 posting per year, it’s not hard to stay current with my blog…), here’s a new blog that may prove to be very useful: the official Visual Studio Blog.

Not much there now as it’s band new, but this should be the consolidation of several other blogs, making it even easier for you to stay current.

In case you missed it, among the sea of announcements this week, we’ve recently opened the Channel 9 Learning Center. Personally, I love Channel 9 because you get to go face-to-face with the real Microsoft developers behind all of our great products. The downside is that there is a ton of content scattered across every Microsoft topic.

The Learning Center brings things into a little more focus. And I extremely pleased to see that one of the two ‘launch’ learning centers is the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Course. Tons of good stuff in there – check it out.

(BTW, the other launch-day learning center is about some minor release that came out today.)

Soma blogged about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/10/19/announcing-visual-studio-2010-and-net-fx-4-beta-2.aspx

Brian Harry blogged about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/10/19/vs-2010-beta-2-is-now-available-for-msdn-subscriber-download.aspx

And Jeff Beehler talks about the ‘go live’ licensing available here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2009/10/19/going-live-with-visual-studio-2010-beta-2.aspx

There are a lot of changes tucked away in those announcements, including licensing changes: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/10/19/vs-2010-licensing-changes.aspx, not to mention the Ultimate Offer.

Heck, even MSDN got a facelift: http://msdn.microsoft.com.

I’m extremely excited about all of these fantastic changes coming, and I look forward to discussing them with many of you. Stay tuned!

You like to learn new stuff, right? Especially if it’s about Visual Studio, right? (Why else would you read this blog?)

Here are three (!) chances to learn new stuff – a great webcast jointly presented by Microsoft and Notion Solutions. The abstract below may make this sound like presentations you’ve seen in the past – don’t let that deter you. Changes are coming.

Abstract:
This 2 ½ hour webcast provides customers a comprehensive overview of Visual Studio Team System 2010. After this session you will understand the basic tenants for Visual Studio Team System 2010 and how it will be licensed. Microsoft has made large investments to Visual Studio in the Architectural and testing tools which we will highlight as well as test management capabilities. Team Foundation Server continues to be the ALM hub of Team System and improvements and enhancements in set up and administration, reporting, and automated builds will be showcased.

Session Links and Info:

October 21^st, 2009 – 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm Central Time [Register Here]

October 27^th , 2009 - 9:00 am to 11:30 am Central Time [Register Here]

November 5th , 2009 -3:00 pm to 5:30 pm Central Time [Register Here]

Here are a bunch of links that I routine share with folks; I’ll update this post as I discover other worthy links.

The Team System Home Page

Visual Studio Team System

Installation

TFS 2008 Installation Guide (download)

Troubleshooting Team Foundation Server (I love this one – absolutely come here first if you run into any problems not answered in the installation guide.)

Administration

Administering TFS (Online)

TFS Administration Guide (download)

TFS Setup, Administration and Operations Blog

Work Item Tracking and Reporting blog

Maintenance

How to Move Team Foundation Server (In here you’ll find how to do 3 types of moves: One Hardware Config to Another, From One Environment to Another and From a Single-Server to a Dual-Server.

Developer Support for TFS blog (awesome tips and tricks)

TFS Migration Blog (Discusses how to migrate data from other systems into TFS, and how to integrate TFS with other systems.)

General

Brian Harry’s blog (The Man for TFS)

Buck Hodge’s blog

Jeff Beehler’s blog (Team System and Visual Studio)

Jim Lamb’s blog (Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Build but were afraid to ask)

The economy may be down, but your access to free training has never been greater!  Once again, our good friends at Tallan are coming to town (Waltham, MA) for another one of their ALM events.  This time around it’s Adopting ALM with Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server.  These events are well received, so don’t miss out on your chance to attend!

Copied liberally from the invitation:

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) synchronizes business goals and IT investment priorities, provides valuable insight into the software development lifecycle at each stage of the process, and can enable organizations to get the most value out of their IT investments. Companies like yours that have embraced ALM have already realized greater productivity. With Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS), Microsoft has the tools to help you adopt ALM and realize the benefits.  This intensive one-day workshop will show you how.

Adopting Application Lifecycle Management is brought to you by Tallan and Microsoft. The workshop will be held from 8:30 AM until 5:00 PM on April 28, 2009 at the Microsoft Northeast Office at 201 Jones Rd., Sixth Floor Waltham, MA 02451.  Meals will be provided.

To register, use the link below or call 860.368.3083

http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=137247

This event is appropriate for organizations looking to learn more about Team System and those which has purchased Team System and want to get more out of it.  And it never hurts to be face-to-face with an expert and have an opportunity to ask them questions.

Showing a little love to our friends in Connecticut – Tallan is holding a complimentary full-day workshop entitled “Adopting ALM with Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server” on February 26th at Microsoft’s Farmington office.  Tallan always does a nice job with this workshop; worth the trip.

Learn more and register here: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=135430.

I’m very excited to announce that we’ll be hosting a free Scrum and Team Foundation Server event in our Waltham office on March 6th.  Dynamics Research Corporation, a leader in Scrum training, has put the event together and I personally think the agenda and speakers looks amazing.  (If you take a quick peek at DRC’s website, you may get the impression that they only service the government.  This is no longer the case.)

The speakers are not just DRC folks, by the way.  You’ll be educated from some of the very best agile and TFS folks around.  People like Dan Mezick, head of the AgileCT user group.  People like Ben Day, TFS expert extraordinaire.  Heck, even I’ll be there (not presenting, mind you, but more than happy to talk to you about Team System, the Red Sox, all this snow, etc.  Whatever floats your boat.)

Who should attend?  If you want to learn more about Scrum, you should be there.  If you know Scrum and want to see how to manage it via TFS, you should be there.  In fact, anyone interested in agile development methodologies and how they can be implemented via TFS should be there.

Head on over to www.scrumtfs.com for all the details and to register.

Although you hardly needed another reason to attend the MSDN Developer Conference (MDC) in Boston on Jan. 22nd, seeing how I’m one of the speakers, but now we’ve got late-breaking news that Roger Sessions of www.objectwatch.com fame will be participating, as well!  He’ll also be speaking at the IASA New England Chapter meeting (the night before the MDC).

Lately Roger has been talking about simple architectures for complex enterprises.  In fact, that’s the title of his talk:

Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises

It is common to hear of massive IT failures; projects that are over budget, late, poorly aligned to business needs, or all of the above. Often, the resulting losses are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The cause is almost always the same: uncontrolled complexity. The solution to complexity is simple — or more specifically, simplicity.

We need to understand what makes systems simple with as much critical reasoning as we do what makes systems fast, secure, or reliable. This talk is about the mathematical models of complexity and the methodologies needed to control it. Complexity is the most insidious problem facing IT architects. Control it, or it will bury you! This talk will be thought provoking and open new areas for exploration.

I hope you’ll take advantage of this fantastic opportunity.

I have personally recommended to nearly anyone with whom I discussed Team Foundation Server the value of reading the Branching Guidance whitepaper published on codeplex.com.

Well, I can no longer make that recommendation…because there is a newer guide available – Branching Guidance II!  Find it here: http://www.codeplex.com/TFSBranchingGuideII

Why a 2nd Edition?  Here’s a quote right from the codeplex project page:

Since the first release, we have received lots of feedback and change requests. Most feedback indicated a desire for a more practical approach to branching compared to the first release which is more theoretical. With that in mind, we decided to reduce the conceptual part and focus on branching practices with Team Foundation Server.

I can only agree with that – the theory is nice (and important to understand), but real-world usage is where the rubber hits the road and is where you’ll get the most actual bang for the buck.

I’m not sure how I missed this one when it came out several months back.  But, man, we should include one of these in every box of TFS!

Brian the Build Bunny - Martin Woodward

In case you missed it, Gert sent word last week that the newest version of the Visual Studio Database Edition has been released.  I’ve been talking to you a lot about this release and you’ve been patiently waiting for it to be delivered.  Wait no longer.  Hop on over to Gert’s blog for all of the details + download links.

Data Dude : Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR - RTM

The Northeast Roadshow is comin’ back ‘round for the “winter” sessions.  (They obviously use a different calendar than mine…but, granted, it is cold out there lately…)

These are some of the best local, technical sessions you’ll find, and you cannot beat the price.  Head over to Chris’ blog for the details:

Chris Bowen's Blog : Join Us for The Winter Northeast MSDN Roadshow!